Discover Alan Rath's mesmerizing Triple Tongue Tree (1998), a groundbreaking mixed media sculpture with custom electronics. Featured by Piero Spadaro Gallery at Art Miami 2025, this iconic work by the American pioneer of electronic, robotic, and kinetic art blends technology with organic, playful life-like movement. Alan Rath (1959–2020) was a visionary sculptor and MIT-trained electrical engineer (BS 1982) who revolutionized contemporary art. After studying under kinetic legend Otto Piene, he relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area to harness Silicon Valley's electronics revolution. Rath hand-designed and built custom circuits, machined parts, and wrote evolving software for his sculptures — creating non-repetitive, long-term unfolding performances that blur human and machine boundaries with wit and subtle humor.Triple Tongue Tree exemplifies his signature style: aluminum, acrylic, steel, and custom electronics form a tree-like structure with animated, tongue-like elements that move in unexpected, organic ways — echoing his fascination with body parts (eyes, tongues, hands) on screens and robotics.
His art appeared in major collections, including: Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Walker Art Center.
Rath received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1994), participated in the 1991 Whitney Biennial, and influenced generations through retrospectives like Virtual Unreality (2019). A childhood inspired by NASA, Robert Moog, and Jimi Hendrix, he passed away in 2020 at 60 from multiple sclerosis complications.
